Marie Salem
Overview
Marie Salem spoke on behalf of an illegal anti-Israel protest encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which turned violent and resulted in anti-Israel agitators being arrested after refusing to leave following police warnings.The encampment was one of about 140 anti-Israel college encampments set up in North America, and over 20 globally, in the spring of 2024. The first began on April 17, 2024 at Columbia University. Protesters harassed Jewish students, blocked Jews from campus facilities and used anti-Semitic language in their activism. They also promoted BDS and protested Israel’s war against Hamas, launched after Hamas murdered approximately 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023.
As of the same date, Salem’s LinkedIn said she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) with a master’s degree in public health nutrition in 2020. She also graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in public health in 2018.
Demonizing Israel during a Hamas War
On May 1, 2024, the day after violent confrontations erupted between anti-Israel protesters and pro-Israel students at UCLA, Salem gave an interview to NPR.In the interview, Salem said: “We are not leaving. We are here to divest. By the university not responding, we see that they are so complicit in the genocide…we will not be moving until we hit that divestment.”
On April 30, 2024, Salem was featured in a Twitter video from her interview with Al Jazeera as UCLA’s anti-Israel encampment representative. In the interview, she said [00:00:03]: “Our encampment is feeling pretty strong right now. We are really organized together with our community…staying focused on our goal for divestment.”
On April 26, 2024, in another interview to NEWS9 Live, Salem said [00:04:23] as UCLA’s “solidarity encampment organizer”: “We don’t engage with anyone who’s not paying attention to our specific camp’s mission and our demands, which is divestment to end this genocide.”
On Saturday, October 7, 2023, approximately 2,900 heavily armed Hamas terrorists breached Israel’s border with Gaza. They executed numerous war crimes on civilians, including mass murder, beheadings of children, rape of men and women, torture, kidnappings and mutilation. Hamas broadcast videos of their butchery on social media, often to victims’ accounts for families to see. Israel retaliated with a war called “Swords of Iron.” As of November 10, 2023, approximately 1,200 Israelis, the vast majority of them civilians, were murdered during the attacks. Hamas kidnapped 242 Israelis, including at least 30 children. At least 3,500 people were wounded, many severely.
BDS
The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement was founded by Omar Barghouti in 2005 to challenge “international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.” BDS is an allegedly “Palestinian-led movement,” although leading BDS activists have admitted [00:01:01] this is not true.
One of the demands of BDS includes [point 3] what is generally known as the “right of return,” a demand discredited as a way to eliminate Israel. Barghouti said the “right of return” is a means to “end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.”
Barghouti has said that BDS “aims to turn Israel into a pariah state, as South Africa once was.”
In his activism, Barghouti has also said [00:05:55] regarding Israel: “Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No…rational Palestinian, not a sellout Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”
The movement has been linked to numerous terrorist organizations and received a public endorsement from Hamas in 2017.
BDS initiatives include calling on institutions and individuals to divest from Israeli-affiliated companies, promoting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel, and organizing anti-Israel rallies, protests and campaigns.
The movement’s most notable achievement has been the infiltration of university campuses through lobbying for “BDS resolutions.” In these cases, student governments and student groups, backed by their own anti-Israel members and affiliates, have proposed resolutions on some form of boycott of, or divestment from, Israel and Israeli-affiliated entities.
Boycott resolutions, although non-binding, have been passed by student governments on numerous North American campuses.
BDS activity is often aggressive and disruptive. It has been noted that universities that pass BDS resolutions see a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents on campus. On one campus, when the student government debated a BDS resolution, reports emerged of violent threats against those opposing it.
